The Chain(91)

“Drop your gun, please, Rachel. Why on earth would you think she’d been kidnapped?” Ginger asks.

“It’s complicated,” Rachel replies.

Ginger is under the floodlight above the door, and Rachel can see her face.

She sees her clearly for the first time.

That copper hair. Those blue eyes. Those beautiful blue eyes. A cold blue. A chilly bottom-of-the-abyss blue. Blue eyes that are watching this whole scene with cool disdain.

Ginger seems to be enjoying it, even.

And then Ginger’s eyes meet Rachel’s and the two women look at each other for what seems like an age but is perhaps little more than a second.

That second is enough.

They recognize each other.

You.

You.

Rachel knows and Ginger knows, and Ginger knows that Rachel knows.

Erik’s app hasn’t made a mistake.

The Chain leads here and Ginger is not going to let any of them leave this place alive. They have uncovered the secret, and to protect it Ginger is going to have to kill all of them. Rachel, Pete, Marty, Stu, and Kylie.

Rachel had been about to tell Pete that they should drop their weapons and put their hands up. But if they do that, Ginger will murder them on the spot.

Rachel turns to Pete. She looks up at the floodlight above the porch. Pete follows her gaze.

“She’s The Chain and she’s going to kill us,” Rachel says.

Pete nods.

The twins are behind a low wall. Hitting them will be difficult, so instead, he raises the .45 and shoots out the light.





70



Immediate darkness and confusion. Yelling and an arc of yellow flame from the garage as Daniel opens up with the automatic weapon.

“Hit the deck!” Pete shouts.

Rachel throws herself to the ground.

Tracer rounds fly from the barrel of the gun and hurl themselves into the space where Rachel had been seven-tenths of a second ago. The rounds miss and continue to spin on their long axes, traveling thousands of yards across the night.

Then all the guns open up at once. A .38, a nine-millimeter, and that big assault rifle again. Fire from several angles triangulates two yards above Rachel’s head.

She buries her face in the snow and screams.

None of this matters. The guns, the gunfire, the sickly-sweet smell of gunpowder. What matters is Kylie. She’s in the house somewhere and Rachel is going to get her. Pete is doing a ten-count in his head. Ten seconds on automatic will burn through the magazine on the assault rifle in the garage.

After ten seconds, he looks up. The shooters on the porch have slipped back inside. The old man has gone through his mag and is reloading.

Pete shoots three rounds into the garage to give the man something to think about and then scrambles to a new firing position. Shoot and move. Shoot and move. That’s what kept you alive in a limited-cover firefight, and the big ACP rounds would take you down with a shoulder shot at this range. Might even take you out.

He rolls into the snow to his right, crawls behind a bush, and shoots again. His whole body is aching with need for the fix, but he’ll fight it and them. “Rachel? Are you OK?” Pete says.

No answer.

He has to think of a plan. Any plan. In infantry training, they tell you that a sloppy plan executed immediately is better than a great plan executed an hour later. They’re right about that. Out here he’s going to die. He has to go in.

Maybe fifteen seconds have passed since the shooting began.

Here goes, he thinks.

“Not so fast, smart guy,” someone says, grabbing at him. He ducks a fist coming at his face and blocks a knife coming at his rib cage.

It’s the guard who’d originally found him. He’d forgotten all about that asshole. The man has grabbed his gun hand and is trying to kill him with a large hunting knife. The knife slashes at his face; Pete flinches, and the knife nicks his left cheek. Pete kicks hard into the darkness and connects with soft tissue. He frees his gun hand and shoots once.

There’s a hollow, sickening thump and then silence.

“Pete?” a voice says next to him.

“Rachel?”

“I’m going into the house,” she whispers. “Through the garage, it’s the only way.”

“What’s the plan?”

“We go inside the house, rescue the kids, and kill everybody who isn’t Kylie, Marty, or Stuart,” Rachel says.

“Sounds good to me.”





71



They enter the garage. The shooter is gone but boxes holding something flammable have caught fire and are burning furiously next to a dozen cans of paint. They can’t stay here.

“There’s a door that leads to the main house,” Rachel says.

She’s up for this. It’s the moment she’s been subconsciously training for all her life. The radiation, the chemo, those hard days in Guatemala, those long shifts waitressing at the diner, the midnight Uber runs to Logan. All of it was preparation for this. She’s ready. It’s all for family, isn’t it? Everything is for family. Even an imbecile knows you don’t get between a grizzly-bear mama and her cub.

Pete fishes one of the two flash-bang grenades from his coat pocket. “I’m going to open the door and throw in a flash-bang. Close your eyes and cover your ears,” Pete whispers to Rachel, then tosses the stick as he opens the door. A second later, the flash-bang goes off with a deafening roar and a white juddering light. It’s an essentially harmless weapon meant to stun at close quarters. It won’t hurt the kids, but it’ll scare the shit out of people who don’t know it’s coming.